[buwaya]

Universal organized public education, in Europe anyway, was an invention of the late 17th century, by Jean Baptiste de La Salle, who created what amount to the modern parochial schools. This was taken up on a more secular basis by various Prussian monarchs.

[Mrs. Don-o]

Maybe we're lucky that the Catholic parochial school idea in the USA was essentially an expansion of the work of St. Elizabeth Seton, who as wife, and later widow, educated her own kids at home, and then established (at the behest of Bishop John Naumann) a parish school which was, in a sense, an expansion of her homeschooling.

I myself am the product of 12 years of Catholic schooling (perhaps that explains a lot!) but my husband and I home-schooled: not because of opposition to our parish school, which we saw as excellent and which we (on the low end of the income spectrum) had been offered for free.